DOJ And Trump’s Lawyers Will Debate Over Documents Before An Appeals Court. On Tuesday, representatives from the Department of Justice and attorneys for former President Donald Trump are scheduled to square off in front of a panel of judges from the court of appeals to argue about the appointment of a special master. A judge gave this judge the responsibility from a lower district court to review the thousands of documents seized by the FBI from Mar-a-Lago this summer.
The Department of Justice is urging the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals to overturn the appointment of special master Raymond Dearie and have the approximately 13,000 documents returned to investigators looking into whether Trump unlawfully retained highly sensitive documents involving national defence information after he left the presidency and possibly obstructed justice in resisting the government’s efforts to retrieve them.
The investigation examines whether Trump unlawfully retained highly sensitive documents involving national defence information after he left the presidency. Before this decision, the appeals court had granted a request from the Department of Justice (DOJ) to stay portions of a ruling made by U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon.
This ruling had prevented the government from using approximately one hundred documents with classification markings that had been recovered from Mar-a-Lago in its investigation and demanded that they be given to special master Dearie. The appeals court had previously granted this request.
The Justice Department argued that its inability to obtain the non-classified papers taken from Mar-a-Lago was also materially hindering its continuing criminal investigation. It subsequently pushed for an expedited appeal to halt Dearie’s review in its entirety.
It is the first face-to-face meeting between top department officials and Trump’s legal team since Attorney General Merrick Garland announced the appointment of special counsel Jack Smith last Friday. Garland stated that Smith’s appointment was warranted partly because of Trump’s announcement that he would run for president again in 2024.
The meeting that is taking place today is the first face-to-face meeting between top department officials and Trump’s legal team. Smith has been responsible for supervising the ongoing criminal investigation into the classified documents taken from Trump’s estate in August and the separate investigation into the efforts that Trump and his allies have been making to reverse the election results Joe Biden won.
In a document submitted to the court on Monday afternoon, the Department of Justice formally notified the court of Smith’s appointment. The filing also stated that Smith had reviewed the documents submitted in the DOJ’s case and that he “approves all of the arguments that have been presented in the briefs and will be discussed at the oral argument.”
Officials stated one week ago that Smith was preparing to return to the United States from the Netherlands, where he worked as the head prosecutor of war crimes in the Hague. Smith’s return was expected to take place soon.
In a filing submitted the week prior, department officials accused Trump and his legal team of engaging in “gamesmanship” to retain the approximately 13,000 documents that had Dearie. They did this by asserting that when Trump ordered the packing of materials in the White House that were then transported to Mar-a-Lago, they were, in effect, automatically designated as his own “personal” records. Trump and his legal team have denied these allegations.
However, at the same time, his lawyers stated that if Dearie rejected that argument for particular records, they should have the option to assert that those materials are covered by executive privilege and should be kept from the government.
They argued that Trump’s legal team had put forward a “sweeping and baseless theory” to support their claims over the documents under a reading of the Presidential Records Act. They said that Trump “appears to be claiming that he can unilaterally ‘deem’ otherwise Presidential records to be personal records by fiat.” This was in response to the argument that Trump “appears to be claiming that he can unilaterally ‘deem’ otherwise Presidential records to be personal records.”
And even if Trump were correct in his allegations, the DOJ argues it would amount to a “red herring” about their right to acquire the materials as part of their current criminal investigation. The investigation is looking into whether or not there was collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.
According to a high-ranking official at the Department of Justice’s Counterintelligence Division, Jay Bratt, “Documents that were commingled or collectively stored with the classified materials located at Plaintiff’s premises were lawfully seized by the FBI in accordance with the terms of the court-authorized search warrant because of their relevance to the government’s ongoing investigation.”
“This significance holds even though the documents in question were personal papers or public records. In the absence of a claim of privilege that is both legitimate and supported by evidence, the investigation team is now required to have access to all papers of this kind.”
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